going down to Mexico city with visions in my head

LI arrived in Mexico City yesterday, after the horror of waking up at five - an hour when I am particularly averse to surrendering to the alarm clock´s diktat, as my erotic dream managers are just putting up the outerworks - the sauna, the classroom, the office, or perhaps my Grandparent´s dinnertable - for the exciting main attraction. Which I hope involves me - I do so hate dreaming about other people having sex. Anyway, at a certain point between 5 and 6, when the cab picked me up, I did or did not turn on the stove, to warm my apartment. I´ve had alarmed flashes of the stove being on, and even got a friend to go by the place so I can get the number of the management company and call them to check.

This might simply be myself wallowing in my fundamental funk. But burning out the stove´s heater would be no joke.

Anyway, I get a taxi, after going through the usual languages - English, my version of spanish, and gibberish - to explain the layout of Polanco, which you would think would not be mysterious to people who drive taxis around Mexico City. Although, granted, it is not a place that a taxi drive would live, since you would have to make about six time the taxi driver´s salary to rent an outhouse here. And as we plunged into what proved to be one of Mexico City´s banner traffic days, gridlock up your ass as far as you can see, the taxi driver pointed out the people on the sidewalk, clumps of them, carrying pictures of the sweet but remote virgin. It is the Virgin of Guadalupe´s day. They are walking to the basilica downtown. It is a long walk - twenty miles at least. Although, given the state of the traffic, I´d bet that a few made it to their destination before I made it to mine.

Later, my friend M. tells me her housekeeper took off to go on a running pilgrimage to Veracruz - the pilgrims are taken on a bus, dropped off at a spot, run for a certain distance, then are picked up by the bus and taken a little further and the process is repeated.